Chapter Fifty-Nine: Bloodline of Ash

Ivy

I smelled the blood before I saw it.

Metallic. Sharp. Like a memory I’d never asked for.

The vault door stood ajar—barely. A tremble in steel, its hinge groaning under the weight of something darker than betrayal.

I pushed it open with the back of my hand.

And there she was.

Wren.

Eyes open.

Mouth parted.

A scream frozen in time.

I didn’t scream. I didn’t sob.

I just stood there, as the pieces fell around me like ash. My stomach turned, as if my body already knew—this wasn’t just murder. It was a message.

Written across the wall in blood:

NYX RISES

The room blurred.

My name.

Not my nickname. Not my codename.

My true name.

Or was it?

They said grief comes in stages.

Shock.

Denial.

Anger.

But mine came all at once—like glass shattering against concrete.

Wren was supposed to be the one person I could salvage from the wreckage. She was a spy. A liar. But she was mine.

And now, her silence screamed louder than any secret she ever held.

I stumbled toward her, my knees giving. Her blood soaked into the knees of my pants as I pressed trembling fingers to her neck—knowing I wouldn’t find a pulse.

She was still warm.

This had happened minutes ago.

Someone had wanted me to find her like this.

Someone who knew that grief, when timed just right, was a blade.

Lucien arrived two minutes later.

He didn’t speak.

Just stood at the threshold like the devil caught in the act.

I turned toward him slowly, blood on my palms, my voice hoarse and haunted.

“You knew.”

His mouth parted—but nothing came out.

My laugh was a terrible thing.

“You knew she was a target. And you left her here. Alone.”

“I didn’t”

“You locked her down, Lucien.” My voice was rising now, shaking. “You isolated her. You hid her from me.”

“I was protecting—”

“Me?!” I roared. “From what?!”

He stepped forward, jaw flexing. “From the truth.”

I should’ve hit him.

I wanted to.

Instead, I stood. Blood dripping from my fingertips. Something inside me cracking open like a tomb.

“Tell me everything,” I said. “Now. Or I swear to God, Lucien, I will burn down HALCYON with my bare hands.”

He reached into his coat and pulled out the flash drive.

It was stained with blood.

He handed it to me.

I walked past him without a word.

Back to my command chamber.

I plugged it into the encrypted terminal and waited.

The file unfolded like a crime scene.

Photos. Reports. Signatures. Diagrams.

Project: NYX

Subject 03: Ivy Sinclair-Blackwood

I sat there. Frozen. Staring at the name printed in sterile black ink.

Blackwood.

Not Sinclair.

Blackwood.

My chest ached like something sacred had been torn out by force. I clicked deeper into the files.

Embryonic development notes. Neural adaptivity scores. Trauma-resistance calibration.

They hadn’t raised me.

They had built me.

Designed.

Groomed.

Forged in a lab with Blackwood steel and Sinclair fire.

No wonder Lucien looked at me the way he did sometimes.

Like I was a ghost.

I watched video footage next.

A young woman—my mother—hooked up to IV drips, whispering into a recorder.

“She’s strong. Too strong. We thought the resilience factor would buy her safety, but she keeps asking questions… I don’t think she’s just learning… I think she’s remembering.”

Another log.

“Lucien’s father says the memory is embedded too deep. That she won’t recover them. But what if she does? What happens if NYX awakens?”

My hands trembled over the keys.

I’d always thought the nightmares were just my mind acting out.

But they were real.

They were memories.

Lucien entered quietly behind me.

I didn’t turn around.

“You should’ve told me,” I said.

He didn’t speak.

“I would’ve found out anyway.”

Still no response.

“I loved you,” I whispered.

That made him flinch.

I turned then.

His eyes were shattered glass.

“I still do,” I added. “But I don’t trust you.”

“I didn’t want you to break.”

“I’m already broken, Lucien. You just didn’t want to watch.”

He took a step closer. “They tried to rewrite your beginning. But you rewrote everything after. That power? That mind? That fire—none of that came from them. That came from you.”

I stared at him.

And something inside me did want to believe it.

But belief was a risk I couldn’t afford anymore.

That night, I didn’t sleep.

I sat by Wren’s body until they came to take her.

And even then, I followed them to the private crematory wing.

She deserved fire.

Not the cold.

Not the dark.

At 3:12 a.m., I walked into the server core chamber alone.

I accessed the deepest layer of the HALCYON neural interface and keyed in my biometric override.

“Initiate PHOENIX Protocol.”

A soft female voice answered:

“Warning: PHOENIX Protocol is irreversible. Do you wish to proceed?”

I stared at the screen.

At the name etched into every file they’d buried.

At the girl they built.

At the woman they tried to contain.

And I whispered:

“Yes.”

Red lights bled across the server vault.

The ceiling hummed with power.

HALCYON began to shift.

Rewriting itself.

Rewriting me.

I stepped back from the screen as data poured like blood through the walls.

Outside, the building trembled.

A new firewall rose.

Every trace of my engineered identity?

Gone.

I didn’t want to be what they made.

I wanted to be what I chose.

By morning, the entire city was awake.

The news leaked faster than we could stop it.

Anonymous dropboxes.

Broadcast flashes.

Photos of Project NYX.

Ivy Sinclair—lab-born heiress to a dead empire.

Daughter of enemies.

Prototype of HALCYON’s throne.

The world gasped.

And then it divided.

Some called me a fraud.

Others called me a weapon.

A few called me a god.

But none of them knew what it felt like to walk into a war already carrying the weight of your own ashes.

Lucien stood beside me on the roof of the North Tower as the sunrise bled over the skyline.

We didn’t speak.

Not at first.

Then he said softly, “What happens now?”

I turned to him. Voice quiet. Sure.

“Now I stop being a chapter in someone else’s story.”

I looked down at the tablet in my hands.

The next mission was already loaded.

Valen had made this personal.

But I was about to make it biblical.

And just before we descended the stairwell, Clara appeared.

Her face pale.

Eyes wide.

“There’s one more thing,” she whispered.

I frowned. “What?”

She hesitated, then held out a torn envelope. “It was left in the vault. Hidden beneath Wren’s body. It’s addressed to you.”

I opened it slowly.

Inside was a letter.

Scrawled in Wren’s handwriting.

One line burned into me:

“If you find this, Ivy—it means I couldn’t stop him. But you still can. He isn’t who you think he is. And neither are you.”